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I trained to be a surgeon when I couldn’t read or write

Ethiopian child bride Mamitu Gashe became a surgeon after she almost died in childbirth

• 53 mins

Interviewing Mumbai's Mafia Don

Journalist Hussain Zaidi risked everything to document his city's criminal underworld

• 26 mins

How to give up

Why extreme swimmer Beth French doesn’t regret giving up on her life’s ambition

• 53 mins

In love and under siege with a newborn

Filmmaker Waad and her medic husband, Hamza, documented their life during the Syrian war

• 53 mins

I’m more than my husband’s shameful crime

Maddie Corman’s husband was caught with child abuse material. Why she stayed with him

• 53 mins

Why I want combat armour made for women

Battlefield lawyer Rebecca Lipe’s campaign for US servicewomen to have better body armour

• 53 mins

The Welsh miner who made wrestling glamorous

Exotic Adrian Street received abuse for his flamboyant outfits - but they made him a star

• 26 mins

Looking for the Liberian sister I left behind

Civil war separated Helene Cooper from her sister. Years later she went back to find her

• 53 mins

Why an ex-jihadist embraced an Islamophobe

The friendship between a former extremist and a reformed anti-Islamist protester

• 53 mins

The song that helped me grieve

Music journalist Jayson Greene kept a grief journal after the death of his daughter

• 53 mins

How my jeans saved my life

Arne Murke used a trick he saw on television to save himself from drowning

• 53 mins

In bed with an assassin

Photographer Jason P. Howe had a relationship with a Colombian woman with a dark secret

• 26 mins

The amateur sleuth and the lost babies

Historian Catherine Corless uncovered a national scandal in Ireland

• 53 mins

Why I wrote an apology to myself

Playwright Eve Ensler’s father abused her. Writing his apology has helped her find peace

• 53 mins

My children were injected with HIV

Jennifer Merry’s haemophiliac sons were infected by contaminated blood in a UK hospital

• 53 mins

My dream of ballooning over Iraq

Murtada al-Hachimi fought for years to organise a hot air balloon festival in Iraq

• 53 mins

The Cuban aristocrat with a revolutionary secret

Natalia Bolivar, a rich socialite, used her high class status to help topple a dictator

• 26 mins

The secrets of a Soweto chef’s success

Fine dining chef Lesego Semenya is on a mission to kick snobbery out of Joburg’s kitchens

• 53 mins

Risking it all to save a stranger

The undocumented migrant and Joburg's viral river rescue

• 44 mins

Born the wrong colour - so I had to die

A South African woman who discovered a letter that revealed the shame around her birth

• 44 mins

Raising my baby in a Thai prison

A Miss South Africa contestant jailed in Thailand, facing the death penalty and pregnant

• 44 mins

The laws of love

Jim Obergefell fought for the legalisation of same sex marriage in the USA.

• 26 mins

The war in Iraq and the war inside my head

US marine Zach Skiles reluctantly took part in the invasion of Iraq

• 53 mins

The online post designed to ruin my life

How a scandalous lie made Monika Glennon fight back against anonymous internet trolls

• 53 mins

The failed escape and the ‘stolen’ son

After a disastrous effort to flee East Germany, Andreas Laake was set on finding his son

• 53 mins

My dad the unlikely meth dealer

James Lubbock watched his dad transform from clean-living family man to major drug-dealer

• 53 mins

The man who stole the president's secrets

One writer risked prison to leak material about Uzbekistan's authoritarian former leader

• 26 mins

Becoming a star: the busker with albinism

Lazarus Chigwandali went from performing on the streets of Malawi to working with Madonna

• 53 mins

The child who saved my life – and vanished

The story of an 11-year-old Iraqi girl and the man whose life she inadvertently saved

• 53 mins

My Mormon mum, my gay rights hero

Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black’s mum inspired him to fight for marriage equality

• 53 mins